I Sit Down Here And I Try This. Type My Thoughts. Try To Dress ‘em Up Like Fonzie Or A Monk Who Just

I'm turning 41 this weekend...

I'm gonna have to juggle a bit. My desire to write and be a real human being and do what I need to do to survive in this brutal, boring game.

What Happens

What happens is the machine 

goes through us 

too damn quick

til we got nothin’ but fun size Milky Way wrappers 

in a Halloween treat bag. 

-

What happens is sometimes you find yourself ponderin’ what hell is. 

It’s geographic region. 

The shit that goes down there. 

Always in the same ZIP code you’re in. 

It’s Monday eternally. 

That deep, polar bear cold you feel all over your body

never quits 

and everything you got to do to eat that day 

is gonna kill you. 

-

What happens is sometimes you live 

and you’re happy enough to (almost) thank god. 

Your walk has swagger to it.

Maybe the air that slowly kills you tastes sweeter. 

You think maybe it’ll all be okay 

till it all wears off like a crack hit. 

- 

What happens is life. 

The world will terrorize the fuck out of you. It does not need your help.

It really was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but that reflection I did on Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing was satisfying to me to write. It was scribbled out at work during downtime with a black ballpoint pen on a legal pad that I had swiped at one point to write work related notes on. There was a time where I used to hand write pretty much everything. There was just something about the feeling of moving a pen on the page. There was something about looking at the words I had formed with my own hand and smelling the ink from the pen on the page. That’s part of the writing process that I definitely miss. For some writing, I’m definitely going to return to the pen and paper. 

Sometimes inspiration does hit you. That can be a beautiful thing. It really can be. It arguably hit me at least twice last night. Inspiration can be like love. Love. Sweet love. Dirty love. Dangerous love. Sometimes it can take you to places that you really didn’t plan on going. Sometimes it can take you fucking nowhere at all. 

I’ve been trying to read more. The journalist Seymour Hersh was on an episode Intercepted (By the way, if you listen to podcasts and you do not listen to Intercepted, you need to be listening to it.) and he said that before you write, you need to read. Of course, Sy Hersh was talking about journalism but it applies even if you aren’t a journalist. 

I’ve been struggling with reading for a few years. One thing that has helped is reducing subvocalization when I’m silently reading. No, I’m not becoming some kind of freak who is obsessed with speed reading but it makes things flow a lot more smoothly if I am not reading shit to myself in my head. It never occurred to me to try and cut that out. It’s something that I’ve done since I was a kid but no, I don’t need to do that. I can just sort of look at the words and fit everything together. Almost feels like a superpower actually. It’s weird. I’m re-discovering a love for reading, I think. 

I randomly bought a poetry collection to expose myself to verse. It’s garbage.

I get stoned enough, I'm honest. Smart honest. The kinda honest I can live with.

Maybe that's what I tell myself.

This is me writing garbage ain't nobody gonna hold me accountable for.

I don't know how to be. There ain't no fucking manual. Bring me a pizza every once in awhile and I'm good. Pizza and a whiff of sex. I'm good.

Nah. Shit. Maybe I sound like the Internet equivalent of that homeless dude rambling about some shit that makes no sense while he waits for a bus he doesn't have money for. That could be you. That could be me. Maybe your wits and your good looks and your talent and all that shit ain't gonna save you cuz you're just you. Look. I'm just me. It's aight. I love you. Okay. Maybe I won't say that again. Yo. We gotta believe a better world is possible.

Fuck. I'm getting sick of this. 10:29 PM Pacific Standard Time.

I feel lazy.

This is art, yo.

This is sugar.

This is late night truth.

This is finding the one true god again.

This is bullshit but it had its moments.

Should I read this again in the morning?

How I Learned to Love the Lord

What follows will be the most honest attempt to date to explore a particular period in my religious history, specifically the period of time where I could be described as an Evangelical Christian.

At the current time, I am a sincere agnostic. I have no idea whether God or any gods or goddesses or supernatural beings exist. Like many people do, when the chips are down and shit is looking bad, I might beseech whatever gods may be out of desperation. I do however have a lingering suspicion that our ultimate reality is spiritual rather than material.

I was raised to be a Catholic. I’ve been to confession. I’ve taken communion. I often got tapped to read from the scriptures at Mass because my voice was clear and deep. I was never confirmed though. On paper, I’m still Catholic. I went through school with largely the same group of kids from kindergarten through about the 9th grade. See, in the 9th grade, shit got a little crazy. I did something I should not have done. To this very day, I don’t really know why the fuck I did it. The best answer I can give you is boredom. You also don’t think too deeply about the consequences of your actions when you’re a teenager. I mean, how the hell can you? I’m told the brain is still developing at that age. Anyway, I wrote up a few bomb threats and emailed them to various students and the principal of the school. I got in a world of trouble. I was suspended and then basically expelled from my school and my teenaged ass ended up getting charged with a Class B felony. This was back in 1999. This pretty much ruined my freshman year of high school. No Catholic institution would let me enroll because of this incident. They did not want to take the chance that I was the next school shooter. You also have to keep in mind that the infamous Columbine High School massacre occurred while my case was making its way through the juvenile court system.

So, there I was. I was a scrawny 16 year old kid who had just been exiled from everyone I’d pretty much ever known. It felt like my fucking world had ended. I was pretty sure I had ruined my fucking life forever because I was a dumb teenage kid who had no perspective. When the time came for my parents to stick me in another school, they found me a small, private school that was run by a local Baptist church. I wanted no part of it. I had seen TBN. I had a pretty good idea of what went on there. This type of religion seemed utterly brain dead to me.

I went. I barely fit in. This was a strange place, man. Nobody ever used profanity. There was no social dancing. Every single textbook was published by a company called Abeka which meant theology snuck into pretty much every subject. The theory of evolution was an Anti-Christian hoax inspired by Satan and man clung to it out of sinful pride. When other regions of the world were discussed, it had to be spelled out in black and white that the dominant religions there were false if that religion happened to be anything other than so-called biblical Christianity. There was also a really right-wing bent to the history we studied. Nelson Mandela was a terrorist and a communist. The Great Depression was greatly exaggerated by communist propagandists like John Steinbeck. It was like going to school in an alternate universe.

I looked around and it seemed like there was a lot of genuine love between people. These people seemed to care about one another.

I’d been in Catholic school my entire life and I saw so much cruelty there. I didn’t see much of that at all among these people. They had something and I wanted it. Holy shit. This seems like the narration for an episode of The 700 Club where a former stripper is about to convert but it’s accurate.

I was a kid. I had made the biggest mistake of my life. It was a mistake that had sent me away from every friend I’d ever made. I hated myself. It was easy for me to accept that there was a darkness inside of me that had driven my actions. Maybe it was my sinful nature. Yeah, it was my sinful nature. I gradually came to believe that Jesus Christ was the answer.

I can recall getting on my knees one night in my bedroom. I asked God for forgiveness and accepted Jesus. I can remember feeling my eyeballs heat up and being aware of a really bright light. I can also recall my ears buzzing. It scared me shitless. I believed I had been saved.

Skip forward in time to today. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect upon what happened. My conversion happened during a personal crisis. The thing about crises is that they eventually pass. What “saves” you in a crisis might not be what you need after it’s all over. Truths that seem iron clad in a crisis might not be so iron clad when you have time to catch your breath and think a little.

I got no idea what to do with this today. Been feeling that a lot lately. I think it would be a lazy cop out to just write that and leave it at that. Even though it is lazy, it’s honest. This is just some dumb blog but I’m not going to write anything that isn’t true and I’m sure as fuck not going to write anything that I don’t feel or that I don’t believe in. 

Of course, that does not mean every single thing I’m going to write will have weight behind it. Shit, I could write that I want pizza and that could be quite true and something I truly believe in. I’m just not going to bullshit you. Do you believe me? Why do you believe me? What reason do you have to believe me? Fuck. If you do believe me, I have to say that I’m genuinely touched. Thank you. 

I’m surprised that I’ve stuck with this. In the spirit of not bullshitting you, I’m a bit of a flake. I tend to give up pretty easily. That’s why I don’t have a ton to show for 35 years of life. When things get tough, I tend to peace the fuck out. This is a long established pattern. It’s what I do. Yeah, a large part of this tendency is animated by depression. Yeah, I’m too hard on myself but I don’t want to be too easy on myself either. Don’t mistake me for a climber though. What I’m after is fulfillment, personal satisfaction. I could give a fuck about climbing. I know that I’m never getting rich writing poems about rain. Poems. I hardly ever do that anymore. Whenever I try, sometimes I end up with these aggressive, creative rhymes but I just stop when I really can’t rhyme anymore. I do have to say that I got some satisfaction from yesterday’s entry when I started off typing the word ‘fuck’ over and over and over again and then ended up on some semi-poetic meditation on the word ‘fuck’ and the contexts that it gets said among other things. I may re-visit that. 

Saying mean things to Tucker Carlson on Twitter does not make the world a better place but it makes me feel a little bit better about his existence on this planet. I don’t want to debate him. He isn’t worth the effort. He doesn’t give a shit about logic or facts and if I’m being honest (which I try to be.) neither do I. They have their place but in the world we got, they got seriously limited utility. When power decides facts don’t matter, they don’t matter. Tucker may not ever read the barbs I tweet his way but I think there is power in giving a mouthpiece for the protofascist scum running the country the respect he deserves. 

The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) made me proud this week with their badass direct action in Washington, D.C. and Portland, Oregon. Good work, comrades. 

We have a barbecue at work to celebrate the summer solstice. Work stuff like that tends to be lame but I enjoyed BS’ing with the people I work with. I’m a shy guy by nature but I do enjoy having animated conversations with people and making them laugh or at the very least engaging with people in a genuine sorta way. 

That’s an accurate description of my project, I suppose. Being genuine. Authentic. 

Authenticity however is a bitch and it can be a luxury you just cannot fucking afford sometimes. Shit, I think you can really only have so much of it in a world where your good looks, charm and kindness don’t pay your bills.